The Mandalorian and Grogu

Disney

We are once again marking the international Star Wars holiday, May the Fourth, as in, May the Fourth be with you. But these days, there is not a whole lot to celebrate as the Kathleen Kennedy tenure ends and the Dave Filoni reign begins. While that may change, this is probably the worst place Disney Star Wars has been since the megacorp bought the IP. Why?

Its Return to Movies – After a six-year break in the wake of the hastily thrown-together Rise of Skywalker, the first time we’re being asked to return to theaters for new Star Wars content is for The Mandalorian and Grogu, part finale, part reboot for a show that last aired a disliked third season three years ago. Its box office is already tracking below even the lowest previous Star Wars entry, Solo, and it remains confusing as to why this project exists at all instead of The Mandalorian simply ending as a series like it was originally supposed to (there were even scripts for that).

Future Movies – Disney has concocted and cancelled so many movies at this point that it’s almost hard to keep track of them. Most recently, it was revealed that a deep-into-concept Hunt for Ben Solo movie starring Adam Driver, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was pitched and rejected outright. Now, we have Deadpool and Wolverine director Shawn Levy doing Starfighter with Ryan Gosling, a total question mark. We’re also supposed to get a Dawn of the Jedi film from James Mangold that was announced in 2023, but still has no production start date, so that doesn’t sound great. A Rey trilogy continuation project was once announced with some fanfare and now appears to have been wiped from existence. There may or may not be a Lando prequel movie. It’s all a mess.

Disney Plus Shows – A bright spot recently was Andor, obviously, probably close to the best Star Wars production ever made, but that’s now over, with nothing in live action that seems close to its level of quality. There is really not much at all going on with Star Wars live-action shows at all, with none of its other past shows from Obi-Wan Kenobi to The Acolyte to Skeleton Crew getting more seasons. The exception is Dave Filoni’s personal pet, Ahsoka, fulfilling his dream to get Clone Wars/Rebels characters in live action, but fans are mixed. And season 2 won’t arrive until three years after the first, so it’s tough to imagine interest has not flagged. Past this, we do not know of any future Disney Plus live-action productions coming at all. Literally, nothing else has been announced.

The Big Exception, Maul: Shadow Lord – I would be tempted to call the current state of things a total wash if it were not for one series, the animated Maul: Shadow Lord, focused on the no-longer-cut-in-half Darth Maul and his role in the criminal underworld. Maul’s story was exhausted across the Filoni animated projects, including his final death, but this intermediate story is the single highest-scored Star Wars project by critics in history with a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score, and with its finale this week, fans are calling it some of the best Star Wars content they’ve ever seen. On top of that, we already know it’s getting a second season. So this is a big bright spot right now, and it may be the only one for a while unless The Mandalorian and Grogu ends up being a lot better than it looks.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.